Cover | Publishing/Cataloguing Information | Table of Contents | Preface |
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 |
Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Notes | Index |
Table for Converting Page Reference

 I

Introduction:

The Background

Those who come to Till We Have Faces after reading the Chronicles of Narnia or Out of the Silent Planet and wanting more of the same are always surprised and often disappointed.  The story lacks, or seems to lack, the simplicity of plot and style and clear embodiment of Christian themes they expect of Lewis.  There is no doubt that this story is different.  It offers more to readers than his earlier stories, because of its greater maturity and sophistication in technique and style, but it also demands more of readers, who may therefore require some guidance and helps in dealing with it.  A relatively small amount of background information will do a great deal toward removing apparent difficulties and permitting full enjoyment and appreciation of the work.

1

Lewis first expects his readers to know the story of Cupid and Psyche.  From its earliest known version, by the Latin author Apuleius two centuries after Christ, the tale has often delighted readers and has been retold again and again throughout the centuries.  Lewis’s book is another retelling of the story, one that brings out far more of its significance and power than any of the earlier versions.  Lewis takes for granted that his readers will know the basic plot of his story and will notice and appreciate the points at which he makes changes in the original.  A summary of “Cupid and Psyche”  [< p.2] may be useful as an introduction to or reminder of the myth his story is retelling:

Once upon a time there lived a king and queen who had three daughters, two of them beautiful, but the third, the youngest, so beautiful that people worshipped her as a goddess and neglected the worship of Venus for her sake.  Therefore, although her sisters were married to kings, Psyche (the youngest) had no suitors; because of her beauty and supposed divinity, no man dared aspire to her hand.  Her father consulted the oracle of Apollo about her marriage and was told that she was not to marry a human: rather, she was to be exposed on a mountain where a dire serpent would take her as his bride.  With great sorrow and funeral rites, Psyche was abandoned on the mountain.

          Venus, jealous of Psyche’s beauty and of the honor given to her, had a different fate in mind for her; she ordered her son Cupid to use his magic arrows to cause the girl to fall in love with the most deformed and ignoble man he could find.  Cupid set off to do so, but, upon seeing Psyche, fell in love with her himself.  When she was left on the mountain, therefore, he had the West-wind carry her to his palace.  Invisible servants welcomed her, bathed her, sang to her, and brought her a sumptuous banquet.  That night Cupid came to her and made her his wife, but left before daybreak, having forbidden her to see his face.

          After some days, Psyche longed to see her sisters and begged that they might visit her.  The god consented reluctantly, warning her of possible consequences, and had the Westwind waft them to the palace.  Psyche entertained them with baths, music, and divine delicacies; when they inquired about her husband, Psyche said he was a handsome young man who spent most of his time in the hills, hunting.  She loaded their arms with jewels and treasures as they left, and urged them to return.

          Although to Psyche they expressed delight at her good fortune, inwardly they were consumed with envy, for Psyche’s palace, wealth, and spouse were superior to their own.  They conspired to destroy her happiness, and found the means upon their next visit, for the simple Psyche (now pregnant, and forewarned that her sisters intended her harm) forgot her earlier story and said that her husband was a middle-aged merchant with grey hair.  Realizing that Psyche had not seen her husband and suspecting that she was married to a god, the sisters returned the next day and persuaded Psyche that her mysterious husband must actually be a monstrous serpent [< p. 3] who devoured pregnant women.  They instructed her to hide a lamp and a sharp knife in the room and, when her husband was sleeping, to take out the lamp and by its light to cut off his head.

          All this the gullible Psyche, terribly frightened by their words, promised to do.  That night she brought out the lamp and saw not a monster but Cupid, sweetest and most beautiful of gods.  She gazed on him with insatiable love, until a drop of hot oil from her lamp fell on his shoulder and woke him.  He, injured by the burning oil and wounded by her lack of faith, rebuked her and vanished from her sight.

          Psyche, wretched and desolate, first attempted to drown herself; but the river would not let her drown and the god Pan warned her never to try again.  Psyche wandered on and came to the city where one of her sisters lived.  She told her sister that her husband was Cupid, that he had turned her out for her disobedience, and that he had said he would marry the sister instead.  At this the sister hastened to the mountain and flung herself over the cliff from which she had been wafted down before; but the West-wind did not aid her this time, and she was dashed to pieces on the rocks.  After doing the same to her other sister, Psyche traveled about the country seeking her husband.  She was refused shelter by the goddesses Ceres and Juno, because of Venus’s anger toward her.

          In despair, Psyche finally decided to seek out Venus, hoping to be reconciled to her.  Venus, however, beat her, had Sorrow and Sadness torment her, and set her a series of seemingly impossible tasks.  The first, of separating a great heap of wheat, barley, millet, poppy-seed, peas, lentils, and beans into separate piles, was carried out for her by a host of sympathetic ants.  Next, she had to get a handful of golden wool from some man-killing sheep; a reed by the river whispered to her that this could be achieved by plucking the wool off the briars amongst which the sheep had been grazing.  Then she had to fetch a cupful of water from a fountain fed by the river Styx, at the top of a sheer and slippery rock face guarded by dragons who never slept; but an eagle came to her, took the cup from her, filled it with the water, and returned it to her.

          Finally, Psyche was sent to the world of the dead and told to bring back to Venus a box containing beauty from Persephone, Queen of the Underworld.  A mysterious voice told her how to enter the Underworld, make her way through it, and return; it warned her in particular that three times she would be asked for help by people who would seem to deserve her pity, but she must refuse them all.  And when Persephone gave her the box, she must above all things not open it to look [< p. 4] inside.  Psyche obeyed all this and returned to the upper world with the box; but curiosity overcame her and she looked into it.  It contained only an infernal and death-like sleep, which overcame her at once.

          Cupid, his injury now healed, and searching for Psyche, found her, put the sleep back into the box, woke her, and sent her on to Venus.  He then interceded with Jupiter, who agreed to permit him to marry Psyche and made her a goddess.  Venus, no longer having reason to be jealous of Psyche, was reconciled to her, “and thus Psyche was married to Cupid, and after in due time she was delivered of a child, whom we call Pleasure.”1

          Readers have always sensed that deeper meaning lay under the simple story.  The names invite such a response, of course.  Psyche is the Greek word for “soul”; the story from the first has been allegorized as the human soul’s quest for love. It readily lent itself to Christian meanings.  The Italian writer Boccaccio, in the fourteenth century, saw Psyche as the rational function of the soul needing to reject the sisters (the lower, physical functions) and be joined to noble love or God himself.  William Warburton, in the eighteenth century, interpreted the story as tracing “the progress of the soul to perfection, in the possession of divine love, and the reward of immortality.”  And Robert Graves, in the twentieth century, calls it “a neat philosophical allegory of the progress of the rational soul towards intellectual love.”2

          This tale frustrated Lewis, partly because he saw that such interpretations miss the real point and vastly oversimplify the story, and partly because he saw that Apuleius missed the whole point himself.  The story was the sort out of which the great myths are made: and myth for Lewis, of course, meant not “a fictitious story or unscientific account,” but a use of narrative structure and archetypal elements to convey through the imagination universal or divine truths not accessible to the intellect alone.3 Apuleius had failed to develop the story’s mythical potential.  In particular he had failed to give the tale the sense of divine mystery or awe—Lewis, using Rudolf Otto’s term, called it “numinousness”4 –which is characteristic of myth: for Lewis this failure was epitomized by the fact that the sisters could see the palace [< p. 5] of the god.  From his first reading of the story he thought that could not have been the way it was.

          So he tried to retell the story the way it should have been told.  In his youth he tried to write “a poem on my own version of the Cupid and Psyche story in which Psyche’s sister would not be jealous, but unable to see anything but moors when Psyche showed her the Palace.”5 Fragments of two such attempts in couplets remain.6  In 1922, according to his diary, he was considering how to make a masque or a play of the story.7  Not until three decades later, however, was he able to rewrite the story, and then not as a poem but as A Myth Retold, as his subtitle puts it.  In a paragraph prefaced to the first British edition, Lewis accounted for it this way:  “This re-interpretation of an old story has lived in the author’s mind, thickening and hardening with the years, ever since he was an undergraduate.  That way, he could be said to have worked at it most of his life.  Recently, what seemed to be the right form presented itself and themes suddenly interlocked.”8

          What interlocked for Lewis was a profound picture of the central elements of Christianity, presented not in the apologist’s form of his early works, enabling readers to “see,” or understand, truths through the reason, but in mythical form, giving a “taste” of Reality through the imagination.  This represents a significant change in Lewis’s attitude toward and ideas about myth, which will be discussed in the final five chapters of this book:  Lewis, who in his thirties put his fullest trust in reason, came in his fifties to regard myth as one of the best means available for embodying and conveying the Truth.

2

Other difficulties which readers encounter in Till We Have Faces involve the style.  A few readers are put off by the sentence structures and word choice.  These are, indeed, less simple and direct than those of the Narnian Chronicles or even the Ransom trilogy.  The extent to which they are, however, is largely part of the total fiction Lewis is creating.  We [< p. 6] are to imagine not Lewis writing this in the twentieth century, but the character Orual writing it more than 2,200 years ago.  And we are to imagine she is writing it in Greek, which is a second language for her, and a language for conducting business and legal matters, thus more formal and less flowing for her than if she were writing in her native language.  To give some sense that one is reading an ancient document, in Greek, Lewis slips into a slightly stiff, artificial tone.  It may at first require a bit of extra attentiveness in reading, but it is clear and direct and soon should give no difficulty.

          Potentially a larger barrier, initially, is the use of an “unreliable narrator.”  The story is told, or narrated, in the first person by the person to whom it happened.  This is a major change from the ancient myth Lewis is retelling.  In Apuleius’s version the story was told by a third-person storyteller, an objective reporter who simply described things the way they occurred.  In a brilliant move, Lewis has one of the participants relate the story, which gives a more intimate view of the events.  Orual aims to be wholly truthful in her account, but it is very important to realize that she fails to understand a good many things about herself and those around her.  She will report honestly, reliably, what happens to her; but her interpretation of the meaning of what happens, and her knowledge and understanding of what is happening to other characters, cannot fully be relied on.  We are, therefore, required to read critically, to observe to ourselves “She’s rationalizing” or “That may be the way it seems to her, but . . .”—as we do when listening to an acquaintance complain of how badly he or she has been treated.  Of course, all the mistakes and self-deceptions are made clear in the end—that in one sense and at one level is the purpose of the book, and part of its greatness:  it is the story of a character coming to know herself, to understand how she has treated those around her, and to take the steps needed to put herself right with her god.  For the alert and careful reader, however, the revelations at the end are no surprise: he or she has already seen in Orual what she will come to see for herself. [< p. 7]

          A final difficulty involves the book’s references to names and ideas which may be unfamiliar—Iphigenia, Antigone, or Stoicism, for example.  Their unfamiliarity is to  a great extent the result of narrowness, or perhaps shallowness, in modern education; in using such references, Lewis was not attempting to make the book difficult or obscure.  For a person with even a much less rigorous education than Lewis had in the classics, literature, and philosophy, the references are generally familiar.  Often the meaning of such allusions will be clarified in the text of this study, as part of the explanation of the background or meaning of the section at hand.  Other times I will identify them in the notes to avoid interrupting the flow of the text or turning the study into a handbook of entries pertaining to the story.

          In sum, one must expect that Till We Have Faces will make slightly heavier demands than Lewis’s earlier stories.  It requires more alertness, more involvement in the narrative process, more willingness to become informed so that material will be meaningful.  It requires, then, an adult level of reading (which, it must be added, some people reach at a very early age, and others never reach), but it will yield, therefore, adult-level understandings of Lewis, of life, and of oneself. [< p. 8]